In Jeon Do-yeon's latest film, the 38-year-old will bare all once again as if she is allergic to clothes.
At a press conference yesterday to announce the forthcoming May 13 release of “The Housemaid” at a multiplex in southern Seoul, the theater was abuzz with talks of the film’s nudity and racy sex scenes.
“My standards in choosing film projects have not changed since marriage,” she said.
“I was an actor before I got married and I’m still an actor, so nothing has changed as far as my choices in roles go.”
These were certainly topics that wouldn’t rattle the chains of someone who has become one Korea’s most acclaimed actresses.
Jeon, who won a Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 for “Secret Sunshine,” has also starred in her fair share of films that have teetered on the border of soft-core pornography.
She has since become known for her bold disposition on nudity and sex on-screen.
Consider that if you type her name on Google or Naver search, the first keyword search results are "Jeon Do-yeon bed scene" and "Jeon Do-yeon nude."
"But there were times when I doubted myself and asked why I chose to star in this film knowing I would be required to do certain things that the story needed me to do," she said.
In ”The Housemaid,“ she plays the seemingly naive and innocent title character who begins a torrid affair with a wealthy married man played by Lee Jung-jae.
She described an awkward reshoot of a key sex scene in the film: ”If I can remember, the dialogue between me and (Jeon) wasn’t too raunchy but when we agreed to a reshoot by the insistence of our director, the new dialogue he had given us was shocking to say the least."
"These were things I could not put into words so I ended up contemplating for about five minutes before I agreed to do it,“ she said.
He then joked, ”After it was done, I couldn’t throw away that piece of A4 paper that contained that bit of dialogue, so I later showed it to Yoon Yeo-jung and told her that was what we had to say during our reshoot.“
Yoon Yeo-jung stars alongside the two leads as an aging caretaker-cum-all-seeing eye that catches wind of her employer’s sexual relationship with his maid.
Think the crazy nanny from "The Omen" and the creepy old lady in ”Rosemary’s Baby.“
"This is my fourth film with (director Lim Sang-soo) and honestly he’s the only man that calls me to give me some work,“ she joked.
”To be featured in this remake was an honor as I was in the second of the original three-part series 40 years ago.“
The unenviable task of remaking the 1960 original fell into the hands of Lim Sang-soo -- the director of ”A Good Lawyer’s Wife.“
"The director of the original, Kim Ki-young, was younger than I am now at the time he made this film, so I didn’t feel much pressure at all and made it full of confidence,“ he said.
”This is the first time in my career that I’ve worked with a truly all-star cast and I tried to make the most of it by making a better version of the original.
From the brief clips shown before the start of the press conference, the film looks to be a suspense thriller in the Hitchcockian mold.
The production design seems inspired by a classic Victorian-era motif featuring a mansion which was built just for the film that its production designer stated in its press release “was designed as if it was a character of its own in the film.”
The film is set to roll out in theaters nationwide on May 13.
By Song Woong-ki (kws@heraldcorp.com)